PBS

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit broadcast television service. The successor to National Educational Television, PBS began broadcasting in 1970 and is carried by various member stations that determine their own schedules of PBS programming.

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v - t - e
“”"Baloney and Kids is brought to you by this station and other stations that lack clever programming."
—Animaniacs, the "Baloney and Kids" segment of Episode 61

Programming

Programs on PBS cover a variety of educational, informational, and cultural topics. From Monday to Friday, PBS shows children's programming in the daytime hours, followed by the PBS NewsHour (formerly The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) in evenings. (Some affiliates in the West Coast, like KQED in San Francisco and KNPB in Reno, show the NewsHour live at 3 p.m. Pacific.) Frontline is the investigative journalism program. Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley also host daily talk shows for PBS.

There is also a good variety of science-related programs like Nova, the musical programs Austin City Limits and Great Performances, and the fine arts program Masterpiece Theatre among others.

Many PBS stations also import programs from the UK, including BBC World News and various British sitcoms and dramas from past and present. Masterpiece Theatre and Masterpiece Mystery! also bring many British shows to American audiences, Downton Abbey for instance. NOVA still repackages programs that were originally from BBC2 program Horizon.

In the 1970 through 1980s many PBS stations would have shows designed to assist teachers at all levels of education in the 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM block mixed in with more generalized programing. So you would have Thinkabout, The Metric System and even a late high school early college level show narrated by biologist Professor James Moriarty III, Wordsmith with Bob Smith (which explored and used the concept of "word cells") mixed in with Sesame Street and Electric Company as well The Joy of Painting and various reading programs with John Robbins as host (in some shows he would quick draw the scene being read by the narrator). By the 1990s most of these shows were gone replaced by fare for younger audiences.

Quackery and woo
“”What does it profit us to honor science in NovaFile:Wikipedia's W.svg, only to open the door to quacks and charlatans?
—Ervin Duggan, president of the Public Broadcasting Service, reflecting on the presence of Gary Null on PBS pledge drives, in 1999.[1]

Be prepared for an endless barrage of self-help programs from figures like Suze Orman and Wayne Dyer and musical programs during "pledge weeks" in which PBS pitches these programs on DVD to raise funds. Even worse, expect a serious overdose of medical woo from the likes of Daniel Amen, Mark HymanFile:Wikipedia's W.svg, Joel Fuhrman, Josh Axe, and Gary Null for the same purpose.[2][3] Most of the "free pledge drive programs" originate from a company called "Executive Programming Services".[4]

Accusations of bias
  • On 23 June 2005 the conservative Media Research Center accused PBS of promoting left-wing ideology in its programming while rejecting right-wing points of view, in violation of the federal Public Broadcasting Act requiring "that fairness and objectivity should be observed in 'all programming of a controversial nature.'"[5] This claim ignored the fact that way back in 1969 the Supreme Court had ruled with Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC that while the FCC had the right to enforce the Fairness DoctrineFile:Wikipedia's W.svg, it was not obliged to do so. More over Telecommunications Research and Action Center v. FCC, 801 F.2d 501 (D.C. Cir. 1986) and Meredith Corp. v. FCC in 1987 expressly declared that Congress did not mandate the doctrine. So Media Research Center was crying about something the FCC hadn't been required to do for nearly 20 years!
  • During the late 1990s, PBS broadcast a program called National Desk that promoted misinformation regarding public education and sexism, often with undisclosed connections between its right-wing sources and funders.[6]
  • When George W. Bush crony Ken Tomlinson became the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS dumped Bill Moyers and replaced him with the Wall Street Journal-produced Journal Editorial Report and another talk show hosted by Tucker Carlson.[7] Moyers returned to PBS in 2007.
  • David H. Koch is a sponsor of Nova; given how Koch's business has so much axe to grind against climate change legislation it brings pressure to downplay science that undermines the oil industry.[8][9][10]
gollark: My slightly newer SomethingOrOther 5000 does too.
gollark: ```Architecture: x86_64CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bitByte Order: Little EndianCPU(s): 4On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3Thread(s) per core: 1Core(s) per socket: 4Socket(s): 1NUMA node(s): 1Vendor ID: AuthenticAMDCPU family: 23Model: 1Model name: AMD Ryzen 3 1200 Quad-Core ProcessorStepping: 1CPU MHz: 3338.023CPU max MHz: 3500.0000CPU min MHz: 1550.0000BogoMIPS: 6989.03Virtualization: AMD-VL1d cache: 32KL1i cache: 64KL2 cache: 512KL3 cache: 4096KNUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-3Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc rep_good nopl nonstop_tsc cpuid extd_apicid aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq monitor ssse3 fma cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 movbe popcnt aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw skinit wdt tce topoext perfctr_core perfctr_nb bpext perfctr_llc mwaitx cpb hw_pstate sme ssbd sev vmmcall fsgsbase bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 rdseed adx smap clflushopt sha_ni xsaveopt xsavec xgetbv1 xsaves clzero irperf xsaveerptr arat npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save tsc_scale vmcb_clean flushbyasid decodeassists pausefilter pfthreshold avic v_vmsave_vmload vgif overflow_recov succor smca```What clear, useful output.
gollark: `lscpu` on Li'nux.
gollark: How do you know?
gollark: https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/2950_specs.pdf

See also
  • NPR

References
  1. Hillel Aron. Left Wing Darling Pacifica Radio is sliding into the abyss. laweekly.com. 21 March 2014
  2. Robert Burton, PBS's latest infomercial Salon
  3. Skeptoid: "Bad Science on PBS" January 26, 2016.
  4. Executive Program Services (EPS), self-described as "Largest Supplier of Free Pledge Programming to Public Television."
  5. Public Broadcasting: Your Taxes Fund Liberal Bias. Media Research Center: June 23, 2005.
  6. PBS's National Desk (Extra!, July/August 2000), Out of School (ibid)
  7. Inclusion vs. Exclusion at PBS (Extra!, September/October 2005)
  8. Is Nova Catering to Its Anti-Science Sugar Daddy? FAIR: September 8, 2010.
  9. Getler, Michael. "David Koch and PBS: The Odd Couple." PBS: May 25, 2013.
  10. Getler, Michael. "Global Warming, Koch and NOVA." PBS: December 11, 2015.
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